Carved Olla

Date

ca. 1935

Creator

Maria Margarita "Margaret" Tafoya was the matriarch of Santa Clara Pueblo potters. She was named folk artist of the year in 1984 by the National Endowment of the Arts. Tafoya relied on an ancient method of coil building her pottery first developed by the Ancestral Puebloan people over 1200 years ago. The same technique was used to make the other pieces you see on display here. Tafoya only used clay taken from the Santa Clara Pueblo, stating, "We get the clay where our ancestors used to take it....My girls are still doing work from the clay that my great-great-grandparents used." Despite the production of new forms and styles in Southwestern ceramics, the materiality and technique remain an unbroken chain stretching over a thousand years.